About to blow...

Wednesday

The people are wakening and engaging in an expanding discussion about the present circumstances and future prospects of our nation.

The discussion began with the tea party patriots. But their protest at the injustice of the Wall Street bail out was turned to a focus on health care and taxes, as the money of the Republican right moved in to occupy the tea party.

The same way the money of the Democratic left hopes to occupy Occupy.

It’s all about money and power.

Americans are wakening to the reality that as wealth in America has been concentrated in the hands of the few, so too has political power.

Led by the Wall Street cartel, that power is used to preserve, protect, defend and — above all — increase the wealth of the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent of the American people.

Something’s gonna give.

As it does, it is essential to understand the actions of government that brought the nation to this moment, so that the barricades to equality of opportunity and upward economic mobility can be torn down and the path forward cleared of the debris.

Creation of the so called “Federal” Reserve gave control of the nation’s public money and credit to a private banking cartel, which conferred on itself what it wanted — immense wealth and power.

The birth of the banksters.

While wages for most Americans were kept flat, taxes on the rising income of the wealthiest and their capital gains have been steadily reduced, further concentrating wealth and power.

Wages were attacked by a combination of “free” trade, which opened American markets to the goods produced in low wage paying countries and no taxes on the profits of American companies abroad, which made it even more profitable to export American jobs. Unchecked immigration of the unskilled swelled the supply of labor far above demand to further depress wages.

Private credit, which Wall Street controls and sells, was substituted for rising wages and Congress over-rode state laws and allowed banks and finance companies to gouge Americans with unconscionable interest rates.

The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

Congress allowed America’s banks to combine and the hard assets of the American people were concentrated in the “too-big-to-fail banks,” and then Congress allowed the combination of the investment and retail operations of the banks, providing speculators access to those assets, which they gambled away.

The middle class was devastated.

Congress allowed the regulatory agencies tasked to police the financial markets to be gutted and staffed with Wall Street and corporate front men. No cops on the beat. Fraud and abuse ran rampant.

Nobody did anything about it. Justice was subverted.

Congress turned the lobbying and campaign finance laws into a system of legalized bribes. The political parties became brand names to be bought and sold, stripped of any real power to shape public policy or advance candidates accountable to their members, and the Congress was put up for sale.

Not satisfied to enrich only corporate America and miss out on the good times, members of Congress now enrich themselves by trading on private information acquired in the course of their public duties.

Finally, in a breathtaking example of intellectual sophistry, the Supreme Court “piled on” the already downed American people, turned common sense on its head and decided that corporations that exist only in the law that the people create, are no longer subordinate to the people, but in fact have the same rights as people.

This is a crisis of justice and democracy.

Wall Street career men and acolytes of the central banking bureaucracy now dominate governments in Europe as they dominated the Clinton, Bush and now Obama administrations.

They are there to enforce “austerity measures” which subsidize and protect the banks that constructed the current crisis — in which they made hundreds of billions — and continue the transfer of wealth to the wealthy.

It is the same fate to which many present leaders of both political parties want to deliver the American people, targeting Social Security and Medicare as the drivers of the national debt, while sidestepping completely the drain of war, a grotesquely over fed and under-taxed oligarchy, corporate welfare — and the cost of the Wall Street monopoly on credit.

The Federal Reserve’s website lists interest paid on the U.S. federal debt for the last 24 years — $8.2 trillion, much of that “earned” by Wall Street by borrowing from the Fed at almost no interest, and lending back to the Treasury at higher interest. And now we’re learning the full extent of Wall Street’s colossal failure and the Fed’s bail out, kept secret even from the Congress.

But the American people are stirring, beginning to sort out how we got where we are, and how we get back to what we want our nation to be. Occupy and others have emerged to deliver the message the governing elite do not want delivered to the American people: it’s all about money and power, and the Wall Street led 1 percent now have a despotic monopoly on both.

How do we recover a just society with opportunity for all? While the candidates for president debate anything else, that is the question the American people are forming.

Mike Krauss, formerly of Levittown, is adirector of the Public Banking Institute and chairman of ThePennsylvania Project, www.papublicbankproject.org. Emailmike@mikekrausscomments.com

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